Charles Olson Quotes

38 quotes in 302 categories

• I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
• I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
• I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.
• I was playing catch with the European audience.
• I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.
• Were all moving, moving, moving. Isnt it nice?
• You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble
• ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION
• There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.
• An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.
• O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl- a bit like Crab Nebula- do for now.
• I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.
• This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the…
• Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.
• I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.
• You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.
• All that matters is that the thing be the thing of the thing.
• I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without…
• Atlantis will rise again.
• Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

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